2025-02-28
30 分钟My name is Maggie Haberman.
I am a White House correspondent for the New York Times, covering Donald Trump's second term.
This story shows how Elon Musk, the world's richest man,
empowered a group of digital engineers to move with incredible speed to turn off spending,
to question payment systems, to shutter an entire agency involved in foreign spending.
It's the inside story of how Elon Musk's cost cutting initiative,
the Department of Government Efficiency,
or Doge, went from being an outside entity to embedding deep inside the government,
taking on much more than just cost cutting,
but dramatically shrinking the federal government
and enforcing other tasks that Donald Trump wants done.
Trump empowered Doge through an executive order that he signed on day one.
But what was surprising was how ready they were to swoop in,
how how much they caught the federal bureaucracy by surprise.
We spoke to more than 60 people to try to uncover when Elon Musk first started thinking about Doge,
which turned out to be toward the end of 2023.
The Department of Government Efficiency is a reconstituted version of what was the US Digital service.
It was a unit created during President Obama's second term,
and our team found
that people started moving into the digital service office very early after the election,